Also published at WireTap.
On the morning of September 24, students across the University of California's ten campuses awoke to their first class of the school year: an object lesson in labor and student resistance.
That day, thousands of faculty, students and staff joined to protest the massive budget cuts to the state's university system -- and to protest the complicity of the university's administrations and the Board of Regents.
California is facing a
This is the first in a series of primer articles about organizing and student power.
Until we are the ones with the power, we'll be making demands of those who do. Looking at the kinds of demands student groups campaign around, it's easy to lump them into two general categories:
Policy Demand:
A demand that seeks to instruct someone with power what to do.
Structural Demand:
A demand that seeks to change who has power in the first place.
Anyone involved in campus activism will know that American universities are littered with policy demands - from recycling, to divestment, to tuition control, to dorm renovations.
It's been my experience, and that of most folks I talk to, that a common feature of activist campaigns around policy demands is that they all start from the same position (disempowerment) and, once the campaign is over - succ...
The Washington Monthly (reposted by Alternet????) has a lengthy, horrendous article about the future of higher education, alternating between being a fluff piece for a cheap online course company (StraighterLine) and being an apocalypse piece on the supposed doom of most colleges and universities. It's a long essay, but it's an important read - if only to get a sense of what the beltway non-profit establishment thinks about higher ed.
It's hilariously chock-full of baseless economistic assumptions, profound misunderstandings of universities, and attacks on professors. Let's see:
And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvi...
Last week students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill covered thousands of issues of the official student newspaper with a lookalike front and back page (check the PDF here). The Daily Tar Heel's issue that day became a "special anti-racist issue," with articles focusing on supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization. The top story? An article about YWC's co-founder Marcus Epstein pleading guilty to a hate crime (we blogged about that little escapade Read more >
So, the story goes like this: woman applies to a college, gets accepted, gets a degree, can't find a job, sues the college. Sounds ridiculous, right?
Well, let's start filling in some more facts. The cost of that degree to Trina Thompson was $70,000 and several years of her life. She got a Bachelor's in IT Business Administration, not exactly on par with the classic jobless degrees like Philosophy or Comparative Literature. The college, Monroe College, is a private for-profit school whose entire raison d'être is to get their graduates jobs - check out their entirely job-oriented mission statement (and their exclusively career-relate...
Today I was forwarded an article from The Times Higher Education, "Ayn Rand revival gathers pace in US universities, despite detractors." It starts off:
On a warm July evening on Boston's waterfront there are surely far more alluring distractions than a lecture on "The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law".
Yet last week young people turned out in their droves for a summer conference of Objectivists: people who study the teachings of the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, who preached radical free-market capitalism, the purity of selfishness and the profit motive and the immorality of altruism. She also championed limited government intervention in the economy.
With stories on the financial news pages reading more and more like her seminal novel Atlas Shrugged, academic interest in Ms Rand, who died in 1982 aged 77, is booming.
"It's...
CREDO report co-author Kenneth Surratt and Bob Peterson, founding editor of Rethinking Schools and 5th grade teacher, talked on Democracy Now! about CREDO's latest report on charter schools. The report that found that, on average, students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools - particularly black and latin@ students.
Independent studies of charter schools show that they might not be quite the silver bullet people think they are.
A report just released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University analyzed data from more ...
PROLOGUE
The scene is Tufts University, 2002. Graduate employees have been working tirelessly to unionize in the face of a hostile administration. Tufts Daily reports in February:
ASET sought collective bargaining rights through the United Automobile Workers (UAW), and filed a petition with the Boston office of the NLRB on Dec. 7. The group also created a website to argue their case.
In the Feinleib Lecture Hall yesterday, [University President Larry] Bacow led Tufts' faculty in a discussion about the unionization process. Saying that he was "not anti-union," Bacow insisted that this is not an issue of ideology but rather a question of "whether or not the UAW representing our gr...
Many schools' student governments are right now in the beginning stages of planning events for the fall. Let me heartily recommend they stay away from one in particular: The Certified Student Leader Program.
CSL is the product of the National Conference on Student Leadership (which is a division of glossy college magazine factory Magna Publications). It's presented as either a stand-alone conference or as a tack-on to its larger tri-annual NCSL.
It's the ultimate resume-padder: shell out a hundred dollars per person, take several workshops and presentations over a weekend, complete a written multiple-choice exam, and this is what you get:
(h/t to Campus Progress)
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